Here is a wonderful conference by John Cleese at the World Creativity Festival.

When it comes to entrepreneurship, screewriting or engineering (3 of my passions) the problem is the same : creativity is nothing magical. You don’t need to be an artist living a Boheme life, drinking all day long, never cutting your hairs. There are methods and ways to improve your creation and find idea.

To summarize :

When a problem is to hard to solve : go sleep !

Did you test this method ? After struggling hours on a problem : the solution comes when leaving the problem alone. It’s because you let your mind relax and find new inspiring idea. That’s great, however it doesn’t work every time.

Let your mind find idea itself

I liked the remark about today’s life : we are over-busy. So we never let our mind wander around. Hence we never feed our brain with new element to build idea upon.

Don’t get disturbed

Obvious but so true : a phone ringing, a mail coming when your debugging, writing, or creating a new product specifications, is terribly disturbing. Sometimes you don’t even notice. Resuming an interrupted creative session is painful.

Reserve Space and Time for creation

Obvious again but so hard to do. The best place where creativity came to me was in parks alone on a bench. You must define a start and end time : to make this work session a special moment in your day. Very hard when you share office with someone.

My only regret is that he does not talk about group creativity, because Monty Python individually talented people grouped together.

And you ? How do you find new idea when you need them ? Where is your oasis, the place where your go to be undisturbed ?